Baggini How the World Thinks: A Global
History of Philosophy
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In this groundbreaking global overview of philosophy, Julian Baggini travels the world to
provide a wide-ranging map of human thought.
One of the great unexplained wonders of human history is that written philosophy flowered
entirely separately in China, India and Ancient Greece at more or less the same time. These
early philosophies have had a profound impact on the development of distinctive cultures in
different parts of the world. What we call 'philosophy' in the West is not even half the story.
Julian Baggini sets out to expand our horizons in How the World Thinks, exploring the
philosophies of Japan, India, China and the Muslim world, as well as the lesser-known oral
traditions of Africa and Australia's first peoples.
Interviewing thinkers from around the globe, Baggini asks questions such as: why is the West
is more individualistic than the East? What makes secularism a less powerful force in the
Islamic world than in Europe? And how has China resisted pressures for greater political
freedom? Offering deep insights into how different regions operate, and paying as much
attention to commonalities as to differences, Baggini shows that by gaining greater
knowledge of how others think we take the first step to a greater understanding of ourselves.
In his article, Julian Baggini discusses how the self is defined differently by Western and
Eastern cultures. In the East, he says, the self is largely defined by its relationality. The self
is social. The self cannot have meaning outside of our relations to others. In the West, by
comparison — as I suspect we are all aware — Baggini explains that the self is very much
about autonomous individualism. He continues, stating many in the West are now
questioning the philosophies of such thinkers as Hume and Locke, “wondering whether
we have become too atomized, too discrete.”
Samenvatting
No-self (Indian, buddism, Chinese Buddhism, Sufism islam, modern Western
anglophone philosophy)
Freud’s phrase ‘the narcissism of small differences’. From the inside of any tradition, differences that
look merely technical to outsiders take on tremendous importance.
Example In the classical Indian tradition,
- The Vedic tradition has the concept of ātman (Sanskrit, attā in Pāli): a kind of personal
essence of being that makes each individual who he or she is.
- Buddhism’s great break from this tradition is captured in the concept of anattā. This is
literally no (an-) ātman (attā).
The difference seems as clear as that between night and day. However, from this outsider’s
perspective, the similarities between the theories of ātman and anattā are more striking than the
differences. They both contradict the classical Western idea that the essential self is a personal self,
rooted in the psychological individuality of the person. Both subscribe to theories of rebirth, but of a
form which is radically non-personal.
, In classical Indian philosophy everything – including the self, ātman – is ultimately part of Brahman,
the universal self, the ‘One’. Salvation, mokṣa, is achieved when ātman realises its real nature and so
returns to its true state of oneness with Brahman. In this cosmology there is ultimately no difference
between the macrocosmic and microcosmic: the whole is the part, the part is the whole. In subtly
different ways, all the major Vedic traditions assert that this ‘entering into’ Brahman entails a
cessation of our consciousness as individuals. The ultimate goal is the dissolution of the ego. It might
seem paradoxical that to achieve this state of selflessness, you need to realise that in a deep sense
the self already does not exist. The individual self is an illusion, so what you need to do is not change
reality, but escape your distorted vision of it.
That’s why mokṣa, liberation, is achieved by attaining a full recognition of the truth. The same basic
dynamic is found in Yoga, where the means to liberation is disciplined practice, in the form of
physical practices of concentration or meditation.
It should now be clear that the usual translation of ātman as ‘self’ or ‘soul’ is extremely misleading,
since in Western terminology selves and souls are usually thought of as personal. Self or soul is the
core of the person, and a person is, as John Locke defined it in the seventeenth century, ‘a thinking
intelligent being that has reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in
different times and places’. However, ātman is a depersonalised self or soul. That is to say, what
defines it is not what we usually take to define ourselves: our personalities, memories, desires,
beliefs and so on. ‘This is somewhat paradoxical,’ observes Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad. ‘The self
[ātman] of the human person is truly and really what that person is, but that is precisely because the
true self is more than – and lasts beyond – that person!’ The price we pay for returning to union with
Brahman is a loss of all our individuality, of what we ordinarily think makes us who we really are.
Mokṣa ‘does not bring immortality, in the sense of making the individual person who gains
knowledge live forever.’ The karmic cycle brings rebirth, but it is not a personal rebirth.
Buddhism also sees salvation in escaping the cycle of rebirth and suffering and thus attaining
nirvāṇa. In Yogācāra Buddhism, one seeks the state of śūnyatā (emptiness), where there is no
distinction between subject and object. This is much closer to the Indian orthodox views it
supposedly rejects than anything in the Western tradition.
What appears to make Buddhism radically different is that it denies the existence of an enduring,
eternally existent and immutable self, ātman. It asserts instead no-self, anattā, saying that what we
think of as the self is nothing more than five skandhas (aggregates): the form of matter or body
(rūpa), sensations and feelings (vedanā), perceptions (saññā), mental activity or formations
(sankhāra) and consciousness (viññāṇa). There is no ātman that has physical form, sensations,
thoughts, perceptions of consciousness. Rather, what we think of as the individual person is merely
an assemblage of these things.
There is no self other than the sum of ‘self’ parts, the five skandhas.
If anattā seems more radical a view than it is, that is in large part because its usual translation is ‘no-
self’. But all it really means is no- ātman: no eternal, immaterial, indivisible self. This is very different
from denying there is any kind of self at all. In the anattā view, there is something which is myself,
but there is no such discrete entity as my self.
So although in one respect the doctrine of anattā is the exact contradiction of that of ātman, most
branches of Buddhism and the orthodox Indian schools agree on the arguably more fundamental
point that the personal selves we take ourselves to be in conventional reality are an illusion and that
liberation comes only when we detach ourselves from this and enter into a kind of depersonalised
existence.
However, in practice, it is not entirely clear that the true self really is so different from the
conventional one, even in Buddhism.
